Stable Chrome 5 is out for Windows, Mac, Linux

Google products once proudly distinguished themselves by toting "beta" badges for months at a time. Now, those badges are quick to come off. Google has rolled out a stable version of Chrome 5 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux barely over three weeks after unveiling the beta release.

Chrome 5 is supposed to bring meaty performance improvements over Chrome 4. In its blog post about the beta, Google mentions 30-35% boosts in the V8 and SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks. And that's not all:

Today’s stable release also comes with a host of new features. You’ll be able to synchronize not only bookmarks across multiple computers, but also browser preferences -- including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings. Meanwhile, for avid extensions users, you can enable each extension to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager.

Our stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop. For a taste of HTML5’s powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We’ve also given Chrome’s bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5.

Google also notes that it will start integrating Adobe Flash into Chrome once the final Flash 10.1 plug-in is out. (Right now, Adobe is up to the sixth release candidate.) As we reported in March, Google believes building Flash into its browser will improve both ease of use and security—users will be able to watch YouTube videos without any additional downloads, and Chrome will automatically update the plug-in.

Chrome 5 can be downloaded from google.com/chrome for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. If you're already running an older version, the auto-updating system should take care of everything.